Alarm

Over the last few years, there have been a couple of times when my home alarm has triggered. On both occasions my neighbour has phoned me to let me know and I have had to drive home, in the middle of the night, to sort it out. Every time I get home, the alarm is silent. Not because it has timed out, but because the driver chip has burned out. The first time this happened, I fitted an IC socket, and I keep a pack of spares just in case. But I’ve always felt the circuit wasn’t too great and maybe I could do better.

Recently I acquired a Raspberry Pi and realised that the GPIO ports and Ethernet adapter made this an ideal platform for a web enabled alarm system. The video shows what I came up with, and the next couple of web pages shows how I built the system.

I’ve installed the alarm software via the steps provided on github, but there is no alarm service that cannot be started or or listed in ‘service –status-all’. The installation seems to have completed fine, the Apache server is running and can be accessed, just nothing alarm related can be found or started.

I’ve not looked at this instalation for several months, so suspect something has changed with the install of one of the components. I’m aware that Apache2 has changed the names of the log files, which has broken the Fail2Ban component, and JQTouch seems to have been abandoned. Also the HomeKit install ( HAP-NodeJS ) was changing every few months, so that may need updating. But a quick check on RaspberryPi.org shows they have just brought out a new image a couple of days back ( July 2017 ) – this may have changed how services are controlled at start up ( ? ).

I’ve been working on moving the GUI to JQuery Mobile as this framework has been kept current and is better documented. But its taken a lot longer than expected. So I’ll probably base the next release on the new Jessie Lite image.

But to answer your question, the service just runs the shell script at start up. So try running the shell script manually, just log in as Pi, then…

I’m running an earlier version ‘Linux DevPi 4.4.38-v7+ #938 SMP Thu Dec 15 15:22:21 GMT 2016 armv7l GNU/Linux’.
I found an article on the raspberry Pi forum indicating not much has changed with the new release, so its probably not the OS, but one of the other components instead.
I’ll try and set a build going here and get back to you, but not sure when I’ll be able to get around to it.

Now that is odd – there isn’t much info on the new Raspian release yet, but from what I have managed to find, it should just be minor changes. So it will be interesting to dig a bit deeper to see exactly what the difference is that breaks the current install.

So, best mates with Pete Lomas is it ??? – tell him his I2C interface sucks ! 🙂